Today, we dive into the anthem that embodies New Zealand's spirit: "God Defend New Zealand." This episode takes us on a whirlwind journey across not just the Pacific Ocean but through the intricate tapestry of New Zealand's history, culture, and the remarkable story behind this national song. We’ll explore how a contest in 1876 led to the creation of a hymn that would eventually become a symbol of unity and resilience for a nation. With a blend of clever anecdotes and a touch of whimsy, we’ll discuss the unique aspects of New Zealand, from its breathtaking landscapes to the fascinating dynamics of its indigenous Maori culture. So, grab your metaphorical life jackets as we speed through history, music, and maybe even some unexpected culinary delights—all in the name of understanding what makes this nation and its anthem truly special.

1. https://www.powerboatracing.co.nz/records/
2. https://teara.govt.nz/en/national-anthems/page-2
3. https://www.newzealand.com/us/plan/business/waitomo-glowworm-caves/
4. https://teara.govt.nz/en/natural-environment/page-1
5. https://rock.geosociety.org/net/gsatoday/archive/27/3/article/GSATG321A.1.htm
6. https://www.chowhound.com/1713688/best-foods-try-new-zealand/
7. https://kura.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/digital/collection/manuscripts/id/13526
8. https://teara.govt.nz/en/national-anthems/print
9. https://web.archive.org/web/20150517051241/http://exislepublishing.co.nz/Hear_Our_Voices-_We_Entreat.html
10. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-aotearoa-history-show/story/2018716783/2-tangata-whenua
11. https://www.library.gov.au/learn/digital-classroom/indigenous-responses-cook-and-his-voyage/james-cooks-secret-instructions
12. Mackay, Duncan (1986). "The Search For The Southern Land". In Fraser, B (ed.). The New Zealand Book Of Events. Auckland: Reed Methuen. pp. 52–54.
13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3033267/
14. https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/opinion/114985760/palmerston-norths-pearls-beat-them-all-to-bilingual-anthem#:~:text=New%20Zealand%20gasped%20when%20Hinewehi,the%201999%20Rugby%20World%20Cup.&text=The%20Pearls%20sang%20it%20in,NZ%20Grand%20Prix%20at%20Manfeild.
15. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/video/new-zealands-national-anthems
16. https://www.mch.govt.nz/our-work/flags-anthems-and-emblems/national-anthems/god-defend-new-zealand-aotearoa
17. https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/43054/thomas-brackens-grave
18. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2b35/bracken-thomas
19. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1500721h/0-dict-biogBr-By.html#bracken1
20. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0809/1194787-the-irishman-who-wrote-new-zealands-national-anthem/
21. https://nationdatesnz.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/MCH-2015e.pdf
22. https://teara.govt.nz/en/history-of-immigration/page-1
23. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/sorry-anthem-should-really-be-god-defend-maori/NJXGISROPBV5SRV3THMGZG2OZI/
24. Baten, Jörg (2016). A History of the Global Economy. From 1500 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. p. 284. ISBN 9781107507180.
25. https://teara.govt.nz/en/document/33764/john-woods-competition
26. https://dict-bio.howison.co.nz/person/john-joseph-woods
27. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ODT19340611.2.31
28. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/OW18780316.2.46
29. https://web.archive.org/web/20100715190521/http://www.mch.govt.nz/anthem/history.html

Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are again traveling in that range and taking 8,629 miles of trip, or 13,800, 888 kilometers.

And since it's basically a straight line, we're going there on a very fast boat, specifically a Grand Prix hydroplane class boat that has a destination country speed record of 280 kilometers per hour or about 174 miles per hour. That way we can knock this thing out in about 49 hours.

And yes folks, I have looked up what these boats are and watch them race and they are definitely not rated for traveling thousands of miles on the open ocean, even tens of miles, even if we ignore the meager onboard fuel capacity in terms of the long trip. But we need to have a little whimsy and absolutely hurtling across the Pacific Ocean on a jet boat is some serious whimsy.

Because I saw a guy from New Zealand jump out of a helicopter to catch a fish. I thought it was a pretty crazy thing to do and apparently so did the guy in the video because the whole thing was fake.

However, he did jump out of a helicopter into the Ocean from like 20ft up and also jump out of a boat into the water and bare hand catch a marlin. The smallest kind of marlin does not live around our country of interest and those are still like 9ft long, 200 pounds and have a big stabby nose.

Other than that random thing and the kiwi being endemic there, the as well as a favorite animal of mine, I'm not sure I knew much of anything that was definitely about this country because much of what I did think I knew turns out to be stuff about Australia.

Two episodes in a row where we're dealing with a British colony is something I think that up until now I've somehow avoided, but it's my reason for telling you about God defend New Zealand.

I have been lucky enough to prepare some lamb from New Zealand once and it was a delicious piece of meat, but it did nothing that resembled a traditional preparation.

I think I'd like the food here though, because it's an interesting combination of very traditional British fare and a whole bunch of seafood, which are both things I sort of like. One thing that leapt at me and demanded that I prepare it though was kiwi dip, because yes to reduced cream and onion dip mix with kiwi flavors.

I hope that this song is that good because it's another long one. Enjoy.

God of nations at high feet in the bonds of love we meet Hear our voices we enter it God defend our free land Victory from the time of life.

My initial reaction is that I like it despite misspeaking about the length. You see, initially I was going to play a different version, but I changed my mind for reasons that I will get to eventually here.

It's very much a national anthem sounding song, and not just because this is a military band that you heard, but it to me sounds like it's a hymn, lyrically speaking. It's almost always played more March like, because most of these things are.

You got this one because playing the official version works out well for me stylistically this time. That is definitely not always the case for various reasons, and this song is not going to make my regular rotation playlist because it's just.

It's not the kind of music that I like to listen to recreationally, but it does stand out as a particularly appropriate national anthem for the country that it's in.

I'm not sure that I'm ever going to get to see all of the places that I want to see around the world now that I'm learning a bunch of stuff about places around the world.

But if I were going to try and see the most magical looking place in each country, then for New Zealand I would definitely pick the Waitomo Glow Worm Cave. It's another place that you must go see pictures of like right now. So please pause the podcast and take a look. Now do you see what I mean?

Because imagine a silent boat ride through a cave with no light other than thousands of bioluminescent worms and the silk providing a soft blue ethereal glow. Never mind the geological goodness that's involved in getting a limestone cave that you can take a boat into.

This has got to be an incredible thing to behold in person. So how do we get there now?

That's really all that we've got though, because sometimes island nations are very hard to pin down when there's pretty much nothing near them, even if they're big. And the only place that we can say borders them is a nearby ish maritime border with Australia.

The roughly 5.34 million people there live in a formerly heavily Christian country that is now primarily not affiliated with a religion.

I only mention this because it's probably the first country that we have run into like that, and it's relevant for somebody that we'll talk about later. New Zealand is made up of 700 islands, but the majority of the landmass is the two largest of them.

The archipelago spans some 900 miles from north to east, meaning that the climate is quite variable depending on where you are. But it's mostly temperate maritime, if you know what that is. And I didn't really look it up too thoroughly.

There are many ways that this place is unique, but I think the most interesting one to me is that there are only two living native land mammals in New Zealand and they're both bats.

Biologists say that the lack of mammals is one of the reasons they have 16 species of flightless birds, including the kiwi, because you should look those up if you've never seen one, they're adorable. For our geology diversion today, we're going to talk about Zealandia. And no, it is not a sort of a silly name for a theme park in New Zealand.

It is in fact something I just learned about a couple of minutes before I wrote this, called a micro continent, and if classed as such, it's much bigger than the others. If we include the submerged part of the landmass, it's about half the size of Australia.

These land masses are generally thought to have broken off of of other continents, given the geological evidence trail anyway.

And Zealandia used to be a part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which I believe was pre Pangea, but again, I don't know, I'm not super strong in geology.

It's all interesting stuff, but now we're going to talk about some history, because I have a point to make. And remember the song. New Zealand is another place where I get to sketch things out essentially from the beginning of human habitation there.

There are other people I could do an entire history degree on and still know very little about. Given the nature of my show, I won't get to mention the Maori as much as I would like to, but it will be more than usual.

But I am happy to report that in New Zealand, the indigenous culture has survived colonialism fairly intact. They still face racism, systematic economic and cultural repression, plus other problems.

But the situation is actually better than a bunch of other former colonies.

I wish I could afford the time to dive into that part of the story here, more in depth, but we're gonna have to head forward to the beginning of European contact again.

They were only there long enough to mark up a map and ostensibly claim the islands for the Netherlands before getting attacked by the people living there and sailing north. It was another entire century before another Westerner made it to New Zealand.

I'm not sure if we've encountered this particular James Cook there, because there's a bunch of British guys with very similar names that get mentioned just on this show.

And unlike a bunch of other indigenous people, they were actually really good at not getting taken advantage of. By the British. They also managed to not get wiped out by disease.

In another twist on the typical state of things in colonization, much of the initially settled land was actually purchased from the tribes, Although cultural misunderstandings about what property means and very different ideas about ownership still meant conflict and irritation for everybody involved in one way or another. And a lot of people got taken advantage of this.

Colonization obviously had an effect on the Maori, but it varied widely, depending mostly on a tribe's proximity to the settlers and how heavily they traded with them.

The biggest effect though, came from the introduction of firearms that enabled the tribes that got them first to have an absolutely devastating effect on the tribes that did not get them. And firearms became an accelerant for violence and political change by force that had always had the potential to be there.

After some time, this got the chiefs to petition the king for some kind of formal arrangement.

It eventually was signed by some 500 Maori chieftains and was established as an evolution of the agreements that were established earlier to try and protect British and Maori interests, but also try to encourage settlement in an economically beneficial way for everybody. Really atypically British sounding stuff. As a bonus, it helped Britain keep the French from establishing a foothold there.

The Pakeha, as the British settlers were called, were initially welcomed by the Maori for the economic benefits. But that started to change as more and more Europeans arrived in the colony and the treaty was tested again and again.

He left that job after about a year and a half and the record fogs up considerably at that point. I have read that he was at times a horseman, a sheep shearer, a laborer, and tried some gold prospecting too.

But sadly, apart from the memory of the anthem, he is now mostly a forgotten figure. John Joseph woods, our composer, was born in what is now Tasmania to Irish immigrants and had seven brothers and seven sisters.

Again we have a man with a very unclear and vague early life and a light historical footprint. I know for sure that he was a teacher in Tasmania and migrated to New Zealand where he held that position in several different towns.

It's a fun story actually, so we'll talk about that again more thoroughly in a moment.

I I can't find anything about Bracken's motivation for running an anthem creation contest and because of the name his newspaper changed so many times, I'm not sure it was technically his paper at this point.

I think he just knew that what he wrote was pretty good and that maybe it would be good to publish something like that in the paper to increase readership. I don't know. No one's ever written about it.

Regardless, the five verses were released out into the world with a request for music to be judged by three independent German musicians in Melbourne.

The eventual winner, John woods, is said to have gotten the paper from the news cart around 9pm but upon reading the verse was so stirred that he rushed home to the piano and composed the air in one sitting. An air is also called an area if it's in an opera and it's a song like melodic composition for voice or instrument.

However, there were complications with the thing.

The completed manuscript of God Defend New Zealand was sent off to Charles Beg and company for publishing, but there was an unspecified error or delay and it did not reach the publisher for nine months. Then there was a further two month delay waiting for it to come up in the schedule and actually be published as a complete score.

To add insult to this injury, the quote completed edition was shoddily produced and contained just one verse.

The Saturday Advisor rejected this poor effort and because their efforts at getting a reprint failed entirely, they and Bracken were forced to relinquish the rights to the composer because they took too long to publish it. Woods really liked the song and was consistently referring to it as an anthem immediately, whereas Bracken always called it a hymn.

As we know, an anthem existing does not mean that it holds an official or even unofficial place as a symbol of the nation, especially in a country that at this point was still firmly part of the Commonwealth and under the umbrella of God Save the King.

The popularity of the hymn that was being promoted as an anthem did continue to grow, however, and by the turn of the 20th century it was one of the most popular hymns out there.

The sources are unclear on what she thought of it or if there was a response then.

Finally, after a petition, it was presented to parliament in 76 and the hymn was elevated to an anthem of a hundred years after it was written. Now I realized that my reasons for picking the performance that I did pick for the anthem did not in fact become clear.

So before I can say that with that we have our anthem and I can go on to discuss the song itself, I think we need to sort of explain the parallel mini story that we is going on. Initially, I, Mike, was going to share someone singing the entire original five verse song because it's actually well written stuff.

But during that decade, a debate emerged after some bilingual and just Maori performances of the song at prominent sporting events. The people collectively landed on both as a conventional performance.

As far as I know, there is no formal law about this thing, but please tell me if you do know. So that is why I changed my mind. And finally I can go on to discussing the song itself.

Musically speaking, we have a composition created by a multi instrumentalist and vocalist that was also a children's choir master. As such, woods draws from the hymn traditions of his time with a simple, dignified melodic line in G major.

It has a moderate tempo and does the anthem thing by evoking patriotism, but manages to do it mostly solemnly and not have a lot of ornamentation. This is a song that's composed kind of simply, but by a person that clearly knew what they were doing.

And it was made to be cantable, which is a really fun word for singing, and it was made to be sung by a wide range of people. It helps that Bracken wrote this in a an almost common meter with alternating lines of eight and six syllables.

Not a ton to say about it musically because it very much tries to stay out of the way of the lyrics.

Wood's work is well crafted for the purpose, and given that he almost immediately began calling it an anthem after winning the competition, he was definitely composing with intent. To me anyway, it feels very much like purpose driven stuff and I enjoy purpose driven stuff like this.

Lyrically speaking, I'm not going to elaborate a great deal before getting into the content of the writing. We have a five verse poem written in English and as the author intended, it is indeed a hymn.

As I said earlier, it's almost in common meter, but it's definitely not in common meter. For example, the syllable counts here in verse 1 are 7, 7, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7 and 6. With the others similarly there nearly but not actually there.

I am unclear why so many sources mention it, because I noticed nothing unusual about it, probably, given that I am not a poet. There is no refrain, but the last line is a repeat throughout so it works as a song for me.

I will be reading out the entire five verses and it will be in the original English God of nations at thy feet in the bonds of love we meet Hear our voices we entreat God defend our free land Guard Pacific's triple star from the shafts of strife and war make her praises heard afar God defend New Zealand Men of every creed and race Gather here before thy face Asking thee to bless this place.

God defend our free land from dissension, envy, hate and corruption Guard our state, make our country good and great God defend New Zealand Peace, not war shall be our boast but should foes assail our coast make us then a mighty host God defend our free land Lord of battles in thy might Put our enemies to fight Let our cause be just and right God defend New Zealand Let our love for the increase May thy blessings never cease Give us plenty, give us peace God defend our free land from dishonor and from shame Guard our country's spotless name Crown her with immortal fame God defend New Zealand May our mountains ever be Freedom's ramparts on the sea make us faithful unto thee God defend our free land Guide her in the nation's van Preaching love and truth to man Working out thy glorious plan God defend New Zealand We've got five very formal hymnal sounding verses that sound exactly like something you would hear at a Catholic Mass. It's quite reverential stuff, but both in that particular religious tradition and toward the country.

It's interesting in that when Bracken wrote this, he was very likely lapsed in the Catholic faith. That inspired his thinking and writing, at least based on the few things that I have read about him.

He became a free thinker and a Mason, which is a group that's starting to pop up as much as the Jesuits on my show.

The Masons are theists all around, but there is an incredibly wide variation in what that means in Masonic thought versus the rigidity inherent in Catholic thought. As far as what the divine is. Regardless of religious influences and theology and their interplay with the actual religious practices of the author.

We are presented with a satisfyingly well written poem that is definitely not a one off occurrence for this guy. Seriously, he does have some great stuff. Look for not understood or Pax vobiscum. Those are two pretty good things that I've read.

For what it's worth, I enjoy what he writes. It clicks really well as an anthem because a well written national hymn and a well chosen national anthem are sometimes the same thing.

And yes, this is a pretty formal sounding poem, but that's been one of the modern criticisms of Garden to Defend New Zealand.

Despite that, and the people that are critical of its religious tone, no one's managed or really tried to write a better poem or anthem and nobody seems super interested in changing it because why it's a good anthem. I'm gonna qualify it that way anyway because every verse is strongly and specifically about the country.

Bracken talks about freedom, peace, blessings and being above bad emotions or experiences. It's a very capital S stoic thought about this thing. The people have a willingness to defend and fight for the country.

There's projection of strength, reputation, and a smallish nod to the place's beauty.

So it checks a lot of boxes about what I think anthems should be all about, even if the poem has a sort of crammed into it feel, because Bracken really hammers home the Catholic reverence. You write for the time you live in, though, and this was a very popular song when it was written.

Consider that you're hearing about it on a podcast about 150 years after it was penned. There is one thing about this song that drives me a little up the wall, though.

No one has any idea specifically what Thomas was referring to in the first verse with the line Guard Pacific's Triple Star.

The best guess that historians have is that he was referring to New Zealand's three biggest islands, which seems super obvious and makes an awful lot of sense for a national hymn to refer directly to to the islands.

However, some smart people have made pretty convincing arguments that Bracken may have been making a multicultural call for unity disguised as a prayer about his adopted country.

I guess the second one is possible because the guy was a poet and artists of any kind regularly make complicated statements about things that they never explain before dying. I'm going to throw my hat in with the I don't know who's right camp, because that's frequently the correct answer to questions of history for me.

I do know that we've made it to the end of the show though, and I've learned a bunch of stuff about a place that is far more interesting than this small glimpse can show you. Hopefully I have wet your appetite to learn more.

The writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music. The music was used with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play.

Hey, I have reached out to the New Zealand Army Band about this song, but as of this writing and recording I have yet to hear back from them. My sources are in the show notes and they [email protected] I can be found on Facebook as the Anthems podcast.

I post about the show and the rare anthem news. But mostly I am asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthemspodcast because my advertising budget is teeny and tiny.

It would be cool if you shared this content and it might even help spread awareness of the undermining of Maori rights through legislation. Indigenous rights face opposition all over the world, so it would be amazing to see at least one country. Turn that around.

Toss him a couple bucks, maybe nearly your entire city has no water and you're waiting in line to buy some bottles for the innumerable list of things that we need water for. Seriously, until your water gets shut off, you have no idea.

You might as well talk about some facts and stuff that you learned from this very episode with the people that you're waiting with. Or you could just practice being patient with other people going through a tough thing with you.

Either way, try to take care of yourself and you'll hear me next month. Also, none of the writing in this show is done with generative AI. It's all my fault, and it's my copyright too, and it may not be used to train AI.